Cork residents grow weary of water issues as council meeting with Uisce Éireann looms
Denise Reck, a mother of two from Castleredmond, Midleton, sits at her kitchen table surrounded by bottled water — her family’s only reliable source of drinking water. Picture Chani Anderson
Parents constantly worried their baby's bottles aren't clean, a hairdresser who loses whole days of work because she has no water, a baker whose business faces closure because her supply is tinged yellow.
These are just some of the people across the country who have told the of their water supply woes which impact so much of so many of the public's everyday lives.
The lack of clean water, a supply they cannot rely on is forcing some to spend hundreds, if not thousands on bottled water each year. Others must boil kettle after kettle of the contaminated flow in order to operate.
“My dishwasher is overflowing because I can’t start it," says baker Desislava Petkova. "The sink is full in the kitchen where I work from. Normally, if I’m trying to clean melted chocolate off an item in the kitchen I’ll throw it in the dishwasher and it will be clean. Now, the only way is to boil the water.”
Ms Petkova, a resident of Mount Farran in Cork, fears she may be forced to shut down her home business Daisy’s Delights due to weeks on end living with yellow-tinged water.
While the problem with Cork City's water supply have been well documented, this is very much a national problem with residents and workers across Munster telling this newspaper of the issues they face.
Uisce Éireann, the body charged with providing a safe and steady water supply, has agreed to attend a special meeting of Cork City Council next week on the city’s ongoing dirty water crisis — but it will be held in private.
News that a special meeting on the water issue is finally going ahead comes almost two weeks on from the postponement of what was supposed to be a special council meeting in public on the issue, which have been dragging on since August 2022.
It also comes as the company begins yet another round of targeted pipe flushing as part of its ongoing efforts to tackle persistent discolouration of the city's drinking water supply which first emerged following the commissioning of the city’s new €40m water treatment plant on the Lee Road, which supplies some 70% of the city's drinking water.
City councillors invited Uisce Éireann, the HSE and the Environmental Protection Agency to attend a special council meeting on March 20 at which they planned to grill the agencies about the discolouration problem, and other issues too.
All declined to attend, but councillors singled out Uisce Éireann for stinging criticism when it emerged that its CEO, Niall Gleeson, and some of his other senior executives, met city officials the day before.
Councillors were told after this briefing that their special meeting was being postponed.
